The Commodore VIC-20 personal computer. Released in 1981. 1 MHz 6502 processor. 5K onboard memory, only 3.5K of which was user-addressable. 22×23 text display. 176×184 maximum resolution. 16 colors. No hardware sprites.

A machine that has been long forgotten in the annals of computing history, despite being a significant success in those formative days of the home computer market. Although primarily marketed as a game machine (make no mistake, though, it was very good at being a game machine), it made a perfectly fine starter computer for many looking to get in on the ground floor of the nascent industry. Nothing overly powerful or advanced even for its day, but you could learn the basics (no pun intended) of programming on the VIC, and build a solid foundation for taming the more advanced beasts later on.  Just ask Linus Torvalds; the VIC was his first computer.  (Mine too, come to that.)

You wouldn’t think that such a humble machine would have a strong demo scene for it. And truthfully, it doesn’t… but there is a demo scene for it. And a lot of what can be done with the VIC will, quite frankly, knock your socks into the wall.

Videos of some VIC demos are available on YouTube, and when you see them you might not believe they were done on a VIC. But they were.

It is possible you might have seen “Robotic Liberation” by a group known as PWP, as it was popular for a while. Did you know, however, that it was a sequel to an earlier (but by no means less impressive) VIC demo known as “Robotic Warrior?” PWP has also done a series of three demos, the “Impossiblator” series (#2, #3), that push the VIC to its theoretical limits and produce effects that literally must be seen to be believed. The most amazing thing about these demos is that, although memory expansion was available for the VIC that could bring it up to a full 64K if desired (equivalent to the computer’s more successful descendant, the Commodore 64), none of the PWP demos used any expansion at all! They were all done on a stock VIC-20, with specs as described in the first paragraph of this article! Now that’s some amazing programming acumen on display!

And if you’re curious about what such a team of talented coders could do with more powerful hardware, YouTube also features a C64 demo they did called “Progress Without Progress” (the source of their name, perhaps?). If their VIC stuff knocked your socks into the wall, what they did on the 64 will likely send your shoes there to join them. With your feet still inside.

It never ceases to amaze me what can be done with these older, supposedly less capable machines when someone, or several someones, put their mind to it and coax those last few bits and bytes into doing tricks that not even the people who created the computers in the first place could have imagined possible. It does tend to make you wonder just how far we have in fact come in a quarter-century…

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